<sarcastic smart ass response mode>"turn up" is is correct because it's a slider and not an on/off switch<\sarcast smart ass response mode>

No need to be arrogant, please.

Surviving to reproduce is the result of efficiency. Adapting to an environment can go any way, more complex or less complex. Radiation works here very similar to how it works in nature. Why change that? Even in nature the majority of bio mass is simple organisms. And that is for a reason.

Alast is right, the more efficient an organism is in an enviroment then the longer they'll live and the more food they'll get. That produces more offspring.

Radiation allows whatever you let it. It allows smart organisms. If you over do it or put it in the wrong enviroment, then yes radiation will not benefit smart organisms. Think of radiation as like a balancer or like a weight that slowly pushes organisms towards the most cost effective and efficient form the enviroment holds.

I think radiation is not the right side of the problem. If you think about it there's no way to "change radiation" from a mechanics perspective that favors smart organisms, except, you know, directly program in that cells produce more stereocytes and things like that. That would be very artificial.

One thing that might be helpful is decreasing the energy usage of the Senseocyte and Stereocyte a bit, maybe to punish the organism that develop them a little less.

To me, the reason we're not getting natural evolution (as easy maybe) is because in normal evolution you have some things on the enviroment that we cannot reproduce on substrates. The main one is the idea of gradient variations over time and space that make. In CL those things are either very hard to replicate or outright impossible.

The other idea is since cells only have 1 function, developing a Stereocyte most of the cases will not be programmed right or paired with correctly programmed flagellocytes, making it just a dead weight. There's no middle advantage to keep it.
This one I have no idea how to solve. Some user a long time ago proposed bi-functional cells, but I opposed that idea then and it still feels wrong now.

That's exactly the point. The way from dumb to smart on an efficiency scale is travelling through a valley. You have your local efficiency hill (meaning local optimum) in the dumb swimmer.

In order to get from there to a smart organism you'd have to go through several iterations of changes each making the organism less efficient if not all other changes needed are also already in place. That is the valley.

Natural selection directly favors higher efficiency over lower one. Local optimums over local minimums. In order to get to the global optimum you have to suffer through local minimums which in direct comparison are less favorable andf thus don't produce enough offspring to keep going that route when a locally more optimized version is present.

The chance of htting all needed conditions right is pretty close to 0 in such a limited environment. That is why you're getting these results. And that's absolutely natural.

Radiation by itself does not allow or disallow anything. It simply causes random changes in the genome. Natural selection caused by competition over nutrients and space on the substrate with the given parameters is what favors one thing over the other.

fungus3 wrote:But what about having the radiation mechanic detect if an environment is 100% deadly to dumb swimming/crawling organisms and favor intelligence that way

That would be artificial radiation.

I already found a relatively efficient method of allowing smart creatures:
Buyocytes. The beta indeed gives us one specific thing which allows us Smart buyocyters, all we need is for stereocytes and senseocytes to actually start with a randomly assigned output, because right now it is quite literally impossible for a cell to change into a senseocyte while having output aswell. Besides this, it would be handy if buyos and flagellos were more prone to being hard-programmed by evolution (reaction to signals, or the new cell age and mass functions)
With the new functions we could also have relatively smart organisms using only two cells if radiation worked at least reasonably ideally without ignoring many properties.https://www.dropbox.com/s/rzkhga6hix9yf ... trate?dl=0
This is a two-celled pseudo-smart buyocyte

-First experiment of the Aspiring Apprentice-Once a single split,
Now a grand gift,
Thanks to evolution,
A complete revolution.

The substrate being well lit,
The cells no longer fit,
One last tragic split:
"I quit!"
-the Lost Poet

I think the substrate size and max amount of cells a phone can render is siply too less for smart things to develop, when you look at real life there is way less radiation and populations of billions of cells that actually made something smart in a very long time span.

What is needed is that radiation dosnt kill.
Realy.
Looking from a game designer perspective, radiation killing dosnt make sence.
It does nothing except slowing evolution. It has a chance of killing something well adapted, something that could became a whole species.

If it dosnt kill, then we can place more radiation withouth the fear that it would extinct the whole plate.
With a bigger radiaction, the time needed to configurate the neurocytes would be reduced.

Radiation doesn't kill. It's the mutations that have the potential of causing the organism to be unfit to survive and reproduce enough. You're asking for a safety net that prevents any mutation that can cause an organism to die. But how would you want to measure that? It highly depends on the substrate.

On the one a Photocyte might not survive for the lack of light. On the other a Phagocyte would die for the lack of nutrients.

A Stereocyte detecting red cells is not worth anything to a Phagocyte swimmer or a predator without red prey but invaluable if red prey is present.

Asking for radiation not to kill is simply not realistic. Just let radiation be what it is.